If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke

adulthood, in manhood. Tying up the garbage bag to take it to the trash can. (“Sweetheart, I’m taking out the garbage now!” “Okay, hon. Thanks!”) It was as if, when he did these chores, he became his own father, and also an entirely new man. The first man. When Tony found Melody at the kitchen sink rinsing out their coffee cups, he felt such a rush of pleasure and satisfaction he had to wonder if this was normal. Had his father felt this way watching his mother fold the laundry? Had any man ever felt this way?
    But he’d also known what was coming. After their nearly two months of bliss, their two-month separation. Still, he hadn’t known that he would be sick with anxiety (literally sick—feverish, nauseated) when Melody went off to Camp Wishy-Washy to be a summer counselor. (“Tony, don’t make fun of it!”)
    A moat of time. A penal institution of time. Threatening everything. Undermining every crystalline detail of his ecstatic existence.
    It would be the end of this perfect world, he knew. And he’d been right. They were still together after those two months were over, but nothing was ever the same.
    The second girl pinned her donkey’s tail exactly at the spot where the poster-donkey lacked a tail. Obviously, she’d been peeking out from beneath her blindfold, but this girl was a born actress, hadeven pretended to walk completely in the wrong direction for six or seven paces, pretended to grope the air in the right direction, before, bingo!, she pinned the tail on the donkey.
    Tony’s daughter wasn’t fooled, either, and shouted, “You were peeking!”
    “No I wasn’t!” the other girl snapped back with what sounded like practiced defensiveness—a girl with a sister, probably older, was Tony’s guess, and his daughter seemed to sense this girl’s superiority when it came to such arguments, and dropped it.
    “Next girl!” Melody chimed in. She was expert, as always, at keeping things moving. No matter what it was, Melody knew that if you rushed at it fast enough with a broom in your hand you could sweep it under the carpet before anyone noticed it was there.
    Melody hadn’t been gone to Camp Wishy-Washy for two nights before Tony had started flipping out. Drank a lot of beer in front of the fuzzy black-and-white TV before he fell asleep, and then woke up in their sublet bed in the morning feeling as if he’d been punched hard right between his ribs.
    “I miss you,” he said to her picture, held by a black magnet to the fridge.
    “I miss you,” he said, leaning into his own reflection at the bathroom mirror, letting the pathos breathe its steam all over his face, smelling like beer.
    But it was a lot worse than missing her. It was like grief. She was dead. He called in sick to his job at the library, and started drinking beer right after he finished his bowl of Grape Nuts in the morning. He lay on their bed. The ceiling was a swirling mess of plaster and paint, and beyond it were layers of shit he couldn’t even imagine. Insulation. Wires. Sawdust. When he closed his eyes he didn’t see Melody. He saw, instead, what he could only have described as an artist’s rendering of a guy named Bud.
    Bud was the lifeguard Melody had slept with at Camp Wishy-Washy the year before. She hadn’t described Bud to him, so Tony Harmon had created a picture of Bud from the tics and features of guys he’d felt intimidated by in the past.
    Bud had the piercing blue eyes of his sister’s last boyfriend, the one who’d called him Squirtlet. He had the shaggy blond hair of a guy he’d gone to high school with, a guy who’d played electric guitar in a band, who Tony always suspected his own girlfriend, Cindy Malofsky, had a crush on (although she denied it tearfully in his car and in the cafeteria and once on her knees at a playground while the mother of some toddler playing in the sand eyed them suspiciously). Tony couldn’t have told you where the mouth of Bud came from. Mark Spitz, maybe. Some